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CULLOWHEE - After meeting with the new head of the UNC system, some Western Carolina University faculty members said they are encouraged by her willingness to listen and to involve them in solutions.

Margaret Spellings toured the Western campus Thursday afternoon and met for about an hour with members of the Faculty Senate. She will be on the campus again Friday talking with students and attending a board of trustees meeting.

Her two-day visit is part of Spellings’ goal to visit each campus in the UNC system during the next few months.

Spellings, U.S. Education Secretary under former President George W. Bush, took over the job earlier this month.

Her selection sparked criticism from both students and faculty. Some students at UNC schools walked out of class to protest Spellings' first day on the job.

Critics have complained about her service on the board of directors for the parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix. They also are critical of a decision by Spellings, when she was education secretary, to ask PBS to give back federal dollars used for a show because it included gay characters.

Those issues didn’t come up during her meeting with faculty Thursday.

University of North Carolina system President Margaret Spellings visits the Center for Rapid Product Realization on the campus of Western Carolina University.(Photo: Courtesy of Ashley T. Evans/Western Carolina University)

Instead, Spellings talked about pay for faculty and staff, teaching loads and establishing ways to measure performance of UNC schools.

“You’ve heard me in some of my remarks say that we’ve always done a pretty good job of educating elites, and that’s good and we need to do that,” she told the group of faculty members. “But that is no longer our sole task.”

Instead, she said universities must do a better job providing opportunities to the poor, minorities and first-generation college goers.

“I’m real encouraged by her vision and emphasis on saying what we do here is for everybody and needs to be accessible for everybody,” said Western Carolina faculty member David Henderson.

Spellings also told the group that pay will be a priority for her in this budget session. Most faculty members haven’t seen a substantial pay raise in years, leading to fears that the university system will lose employees and have a hard time recruiting.

“If we lose that advantage, we really undermine what we do as an institution,” she said.

Across the system, “It feels like a tipping point,” David McCord, WCU professor of psychology, said. “If it’s not this year, there’s going to be massive losses of talent and major inability to draw new people like we have historically been able to do. The concern is really for the welfare of the overall system.”

Spellings also touched on concerns over the N.C. Guaranteed Admission Program or NCGAP, which would route some students to community colleges rather than UNC schools. One goal of the legislation is to increase graduation rates among students.

But a recent report raised concerns that it would hurt rural, low income and minority students and would also harm the state’s historically black universities.

“Right problem. Wrong answer,” Spellings said of the plan.

But Spellings said the challenge for the universities is to come up with alternatives. “If not this, what?” she asked faculty members.

She said the system can “stave off the NCGAP solutions” with research-based alternatives.

She said the system needs to be involved in coming up with solutions to issues that are being raised.

“The point is these are simple solutions that are coming from people who are frustrated, who want to meet the public’s demands and are searching around for solutions. I think our job is to say that’s not a good idea, here’s why. But here’s a better way to think about it,” she said.

Spellings also said she’d like to see some kind of measures for universities — “an understanding, a report card, a contract” — developed ahead of the 2017 legislative session.

She’s not sure what those would look like, but said they would likely include some “common” indicators which would apply to all schools as well as some unique measures to reflect the different missions of each UNC system university.

Faculty members say Spellings seems eager to work with them and they are encouraged by what she had to say. But “time will tell” how she does.

“Is she going to be able to deal with the opposing pressures that she just walked in the middle of? She seems really capable of doing that,” McCord said.

Bill Yang, an associate professor of electrical engineering, was encouraged.